You are here

Richard H Skaggs

Contact Me

Affiliations

Links

My research and instruction are strongly focused in climatology. There are three phases to my career during and after graduate school. My M.A. and doctoral research at the University of Kansas was on the climatology of severe local storms, especially tornadoes. Papers in the Monthly Weather Review resulted from my thesis and dissertation. I continued my research on severe local storms for a few years after coming to the University of Minnesota. In the 1970s and 1980s, my research concentrated on the climatology of drought, particularly its spatial pattern over the United States and its persistence through time. This research led to a series of papers in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Geographical Analysis, the Monthly Weather Review, and Idojaras. In the middle 1980s, I started joint research with Donald G. Baker on the Eastern Minnesota temperature record. These results are reported in a series of papers in Climatic Change, Journal Climate, Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Climate Research, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. During most of the 1990s, I was an academic administrator (Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Associate Vice President for Arts, Sciences, and Engineering); my research was extremely limited during this period. In the past several years, I have been investigating extreme precipitation in Minnesota and assessing the impacts of climate variability and change on Minnesota natural resources.